segunda-feira, 21 de novembro de 2016

Hitler salutes and white supremacism: a weekend with the 'alt-right'

President-elect
Donald Trump has appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist.
Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network, ‘a
platform for the alt-right’. Here we explain what that means –
and why many liberals fear his appointment will encourage
antisemites, racists and misogynists

Hitler
salutes and white supremacism: a weekend with the 'alt-right'

The
‘alt-right’ conference in Washington wasn’t a gathering of a
forgotten white working class. It was a white nationalist movement
buoyed by millennials

Some of the most
prominent members of the so-called “alt-right”, the white
nationalist movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the
presidency, gathered in Washington DC on Saturday to plot how the
movement can “start influencing policy and culture” under the
Trump administration.

There was a
celebratory mood as Richard Spencer, the president of the National
Policy Institute, a nationalist thinktank which hosted the day-long
conference, talked about how the “alt-right” would be an
“intellectual vanguard” for Trump and the rightwing at large.

But to an outsider,
the conference merely served as a shocking insight into the racism,
sexism and disturbing beliefs of the “alt-right”.

The event concluded
with a 40-minute pseudo-academic lecture called America and Jewish
Consciousness, by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor
described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the neo-Nazi
movement’s favorite academic”, and a series of Nazi salutes by
members of the audience.

Trump’s win in the
presidential election, and the subsequent selection of Stephen Bannon
– the executive chairman of Breitbart News – as Trump’s “chief
strategist”, made for plenty of optimism.

Spencer, one of the
most prominent faces of the movement, was among the most optimistic
about Trump’s presidency.

“With Donald
Trump, we feel like we have a dog in the fight for the first time,”
Spencer told the Guardian. “And with him there’s a real chance we
could start influencing policy and culture.”

Spencer said the
“alt-right” was aiming to exert that influence by publishing
regular policy papers advancing white nationalist ideas. The hope is
that “alt-right” ideas can enter the mainstream and – through
Trump and Bannon – have an impact on the government.

A policy he
mentioned several times on Saturday is “a break on all immigration”
for a 50-year period – something he believes would help maintain a
white-dominant society in the US.

“We want to
influence people. We want to be an intellectual vanguard that starts
to inflect policy, inflect culture, inflect politics,” he said.

“That’s what we
can do.”

•••

The “alt-right”
visit to Washington DC had got off to an inauspicious start.

Conference attendees
had gathered at a restaurant for a private dinner on Friday night,
but anti-fascism protesters were tipped off to their location and
stormed into the restaurant, disrupting the meal.

The protesters were
swiftly ushered outside, but not before one of them had sprayed
Spencer with what the thinktank president described as a
“shit-smelling substance”.

On Saturday morning,
about 200 activists demonstrated outside the conference at the Ronald
Reagan building, a couple of blocks south-east of the White House.

Inside Spencer, who
seemed to have got rid of the smell, held a press conference in the
convention hall. About 150 movement adherents watched as journalists
asked questions; listeners occasionally booed certain publications –
including the Guardian.

The Southern Poverty
Law Center has described Spencer as “a suit-and-tie version of the
white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis”,
and on Saturday he was dressed accordingly, in a fitted grey suit and
brown loafers, and sporting an undercut hairstyle.

Spencer, 38, who
grew up in Boston, had convened a panel of five other white men for
the conference, but he did most of the talking – railing against
the protesters and Twitter, which recently suspended the accounts of
Spencer and others.

When the time came
for questions, I pointed out – to more boos from the crowd – that
there were very few women at the event. It prompted a surreal
discussion between six white men about the sexual preferences of
women.

The almost entirely
male audience cheered when Spencer made his statement about women’s
desire for a “strong man”.

“I’ve looked at
a lot of romance novels that women read and I’ve noticed a distinct
pattern,” Spencer said.

“Romance novels
about cubicle-dwelling boring computer programmers don’t sell very
well. Romance novels about cowboys and vikings seem to be very
popular. We might want to look at something like that and see if that
tells us something about human nature.”

MacDonald, the
academic, had been drafted onto the panel. He also chipped in.

“This is textbook
stuff,” MacDonald said. “Women are attracted to wealth and
power.”

The term “alt-right”
was coined by Spencer, and refers to an American movement. But it was
clear that the success of the movement had begun to interest people
from elsewhere.

Three men from a
Dutch group called Erkenbrand, which they said was inspired by the
movement, had come to the US specifically for the conference.

“It’s about
preserving the nationality of our country,” said one of them, who
gave his name as Bas. “It’s coming to a point where in 50 years,
ethnically Dutch will be a minority.”

Matthew Tait, a
former member of the British National party, a far-right political
party that peaked in 2009, when it won two seats in European
parliament, was also in attendance. He said he had formed “alt-right
London” in August. The group has around 25 members.

“I’ve got people
coming along who have never been involved in any politics before,
never been involved in any political party, but they have become
red-pilled,” Tait said, a reference to the 1999 film, The Matrix,
on the idea of taking a pill and recognising reality.

“A lot of that
comes from the shared language we have with Americans. It’s a lot
of the American websites – it’s from VDare, American Renaissance
[two popular ‘alt-right’ websites] and to even Alex Jones,
they’ve come into contact with out-of-the-box thinking.”

Like Spencer, Tait,
31, was well-dressed, in a sharp suit and a white open-necked shirt.

Well-spoken and
porcine, he seemed harmless enough until he started talking about how
“you can’t really be English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh unless you
are broadly genetically from that place”. He told me that his test
for Britishness would be to “use your eyes”, and talked about how
British people of Indian and Pakistani heritage – even third
generation Brits – would ideally self-deport “to be with their
own people”.

•••

Outside the
conference, the anti-fascist activists were protesting almost exactly
the kind of thing Tait was saying. The demonstration continued for
most of the day, blocking the main entrance to the Reagan building.

The presence of the
protesters meant that most of the conference attendees chose to spend
a designated two-hour break inside the building, instead of exploring
the National Mall or walking over towards the White House.

It gave me the
opportunity to chat to some of the conference-goers. A 26-year-old
man named JP started telling me about the culture of the movement.

“There are three
categories of clothing,” he said.

“There’s
‘fascie’. That’s like a portmanteau of the word fascist but
used to describe a look – like a really dark suit.

I’d noticed the
number of people with undercuts at the conference – the short back
and sides, long on top hairstyle popular with people from Brooklyn
and actors from the television show Peaky Blinders. It’s called a
fascie, JP said.

JP, who was wearing
a purple suit, a grey turtleneck, and Wolverine boots that his cousin
bought him for his birthday, had travelled to the conference from
Connecticut.

He’d told his
parents he was going to media event for millennials – he’s a
media production student – and as we walked outside the convention
hall to get some air he told me he was uncomfortable with having
lied.

“I feel like a
piece of shit,” JP said.

“It’s difficult
sometimes because my family doesn’t like it when I talk about
politics. And it’s sad for me because I know it makes them
uncomfortable, but at the same time it almost feels like I’m coming
out of the closet in the way.

“In fact that’s
what it feels like for a lot of millennials. They feel like they
can’t be who they are.”

A lot of people at
the conference talked to me about about “evolutionary psychology”:
the idea that human behavior has been shaped by natural selection.
They almost always used this idea to draw parallels between race and
intelligence.

JP gave an example.

“Different ethnic
groups are more likely to have higher IQs than each other,” he
said.

“Let’s say that
you live in an area where it snows a lot – well, your ancestors
have to figure out how to deal with the snow. Which means they have
to figure out how to store food and for how long, how much salt do
they have to put in with the meat. All these things that caused their
brain to go: ‘OK, how do I …’

“Whereas if, let’s
say, you live in a jungle environment where there’s food literally
everywhere and there’s only two weather conditions, rainy and
sunny, then your brain doesn’t need to really go: ‘Oh, I got to
think about how to do stuff.’”

This was one of the
many times at the NPI conference where I was being told so many
offensive things I felt as if I was being lampooned. But time after
time I heard variations on the same themes JP or Tait had talked
about.

At the conference’s
evening drinks reception, I was chatting to a smartly dressed man in
his mid-40s. Like many at the conference, he didn’t want to be
named. When he realized I was British, he told me the UK was
“infested with blacks”. He then said people from Africa were at a
“different level of evolutionary development” and that non-white
people were of “inferior stock”.

The man was more
openly racist than others at the conference – he actually used the
term “racist” to refer to himself – but his comments were
essentially the same as what JP had said.

And it wasn’t as
if the racism was only coming from casual attendees.

Bill Regnery, the
founder of the National Policy Institute and a man who looks like a
less pleasant version of Ron Paul, came over to me at one point near
the entrance to the convention center and grabbed my arm. He said he
thought the “alt-right” was “fucking brilliant”, then started
talking about how “Pakis” – a racial slur for people from
Pakistan – were ruining the UK.

Reeling from that, I
walked into the area where people were eating dinner just in time to
see around 20 men – some wearing Make America Great Again hats –
leap from their seats and give the Nazi salute to a speaker.

One of the men
wearing a hat, called Mack, walked past and me and I asked what the
salute was about.

“The whole thing
is we have jokes that offend the outside and we laugh,” he said.

“It’s
hilarious.”

•••

While Mack and I
were talking, MacDonald, the former professor, was giving his speech
on America and Jewish consciousness. He’d started off his speech by
saying: “Tonight I want to talk about Jews,” which had got a big
laugh from the crowd.

I asked Mack, 30, if
he believed in the Holocaust. A couple of people I’d spoken to
earlier had expressed doubts.

“I’m not sure, I
don’t know what to believe,” he said. “If it did happen, that’s
a terrible thing. I don’t agree with genocide.

“But I mean, if it
happened it’s a very practical, I mean an uber-practical, kind of
thing to say: ‘If it is people among a people who, let’s say, are
destroying Germany because of x, y, z, then let’s root them all out
and destroy them as people completely.’

“That’s pretty
practical. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a moral thing. It’s
not admirable. I don’t think it’s a good thing.”

There didn’t seem
to be a consistent theme in why people at the conference wanted a
majority-white America. The people I spoke to didn’t even have that
much in common, beyond being racist and angry and confused.

JP said his family
were all Democrats. He’d become interested in the “alt-right”
through the internet. A man who wanted to be identified as “an
attendee” said he became a white nationalist after his
father-in-law drove him through a predominantly black neighborhood in
a large city.

Others cited suspect
academics, whose work is circulated by “alt-right” publications,
to suggest that different races were better kept apart.

The movement is
sometimes presented as a sort of blue-collar rejection of
establishment politicians and the status quo.

But this wasn’t a
gathering of a forgotten white working class, who had lost
manufacturing jobs or been left behind by globalization. The majority
of attendees were in their 20s or 30s, and everyone I spoke to either
had a job or was in school.

This was essentially
a gathering of racists. Racists who have found a movement that echoes
their views and gives them a place to vent their anger.

In a different time,
it might have been better to ignore these people entirely. There have
always been angry, confused, racist men.

But this particular
group of angry, confused, racist men now have a president who was
elected, in part, by speaking their language. In Bannon, they will
have one of the icons of their movement stationed in the White House,
advising that president.

With Spencer and the
rest of the “alt-right” hoping to capitalize on those
connections, dismissing this movement would be a mistake.